How to add a vacation responder when you are away

Overview

Planning a vacation? Create a vacation responder to automatically reply to your customers while you're gone. 

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Instructions

Step 1

Go to Settings, select Message templates, then Vacation responders, and Add a vacation responder.

Step 2

Give your vacation responder a name, and complete the rest of the fields. Be sure to only enable the responder before you leave. Vacation responders are for individual inboxes only. See this article on how to create an out of office reply for team inboxes.

Note: If you choose to schedule the vacation responder, the end date is the last day you want the vacation responder to trigger.

Step 3

Write your message and click Create. You can also use variables that will be replaced dynamically.

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How it works

On your specified Start date, any inbound message sent to the channel you've specified in your vacation responder's settings will begin receiving your vacation responder's message as a reply. The vacation responder will automatically stop sending after your specified End date. If needed, you can can toggle off Enable during any period in order to pause the vacation responder.

If you have multiple private channels, you can select more than one channel in your vacation responder's settings, or you can create separate vacation responders for different channels.

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Exceptions to vacation responder

Was the inbound message auto-generated?

Front will not send any vacation responder auto-responses to auto-generated messages

Has the recipient already received that vacation responder within the last 4 days?

Front will send vacation responder messages to a recipient at most once every 4 days.

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Reasons why a vacation responder might not reply

A vacation responder may fail to reply to messages. There are some reasons why this might happen:

• The inbound message was auto-generated. Front will not send any auto-responses to auto-generated messages.
• That recipient received your vacation responder message within the last 4 days. Front will only your send vacation responder to a recipient at most once every 4 days.
• The inbound message was not addressed directly to your channel. For example, if support@example.com is my mail email address (and the channel connected to Front), emails sent directly to support@example.com should generally receive vacation responder messages. If help@example.com is an alias of support@example.com, emailing help@ will deliver messages to Front via my support@ channel, but no vacation responder messages will be sent.
  Similarly, if I receive messages via a distribution list, those emails will be addressed to the distribution list, and not my channel, so while I will receive those messages in Front, no vacation responder will be sent.